


Let's be superheroes

by deliverusfromsburb



Series: Tuesjade Prompts [14]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: (for a good cause), Gen, I wasn't sure what to make of these two interacting, and breaking into a car, so this story became a lot about them not knowing what to make of each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 09:34:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13268673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: tuesjade prompt: superhero





	Let's be superheroes

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote Midnighters fic a million years ago, and I was channeling Melissa hard for all the emotion-smells. Good times.

You’ve grown accustomed to the alien scents of your human traveling companions, but their friends from the golden ship take getting used to. Davesprite smells like Dave but not quite, oranges rather than cherries with the addition of dusty feathers and the electric zing of a game ghost. John, to your annoyance, you can’t smell at all. The Breeze he carries with him scatters traces around the room in incomprehensible fragments, and underneath that he’s just… nothing. A John shaped hole in the universe.

Jade smells like a taster’s menu of contradictions. Human warmth, the dull fizz of game ghosts, the jolt of First Guardian power like a bowl of lime sorbet hooked up to a car battery. She wraps herself in bright colors a lot of the time too and carries around dirt and flower pollen from her greenhouse. Add the trace of almost-Earth canine, and your nose is half convinced an entire circus has gone by. Complicated, but not in the way that tempts you poke around in her thinkpan to dig things up. She’s not to your taste, which mostly means not a good meddling partner – she won’t crumble or meddle back. Boring.  So mostly, you leave her alone.

Sometimes, though, she doesn’t return the favor. You’re sitting on the front steps, crushing the bright red bugs that like to crawl around and watching their vivid guts smear all over the concrete. She pops in behind you with a puff of displaced air. “Hi,” you say.

She takes that in stride. These days, you can’t put anyone off. “You smelled me coming, right? This outfit is brand new, too.” She smooths out the front of her dress, which is a yellow you can only describe as nostril-searing. “My nose is pretty good, but yours is like a superpower.”

“Well, we can’t all have flashy god abilities. Some of us didn’t die in the right places.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure your Mindy abilities are a superpower too. No one said you had to stop at just one!”

You make a dismissive pff noise that sometimes works for getting rid of people. You’re not as down on yourself about your abilities as you used to be, but you don’t exactly talk them up either. They’re not like levitating objects or summoning tornadoes. Mostly they involve using your common sense. The fact that this is granted superpower status speaks volumes about your ensemble.

“What’s it like, anyway?” she asks, and, to cement in that she doesn’t plan on going anywhere anytime soon, sits down beside you. The neo-expressionist bug juice artwork you had been constructing disappears under her skirt.

You sigh. It’s a burden, but these days, people like to ‘check in’. Could be worse. “It shows me the outcomes from actions people take, or potential decisions that they could make. For example, I don't see us becoming best friends thanks to you taking an interest."

Her ears twitch, but she isn’t dissuaded. Her family isn’t properly perturbed by you being prickly. Either they take it in stride, think it’s a joke, or only become more determined. “We don’t need to be best friends. It’s hard enough working out being best friends again with the ones that I have. But we’re all together for now, so it seems silly to never talk. Do you see that getting any better?”

You don’t need your powers to look at people and see how they work together. You just need to think. Consider personality traits, weigh the angles. You don’t understand why other people can’t do it too. “I can only see so far,” you say. “A few steps after any decision. The back of your dress is going to be stained when you stand up. Jake’s going to get distracted by a text message and forget to turn the faucet off.  The park’s going to catch fire because of where some jackass parked his car.”

That gets her attention. “Has that happened yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Then we should do something about it.” She stands up – yup, there are the bug guts, like ketchup and mustard - and looks down at you. You’re still sitting and wondering how you have become part of a _we_ in this situation. “Come on!”

You think about saying that you’ve just got the concrete nice and comfy, but it’s not like the steps are that inviting. “Sure,” you say. “Let’s be superheroes.”

 

The park isn’t far, but Jade teleports you in her haste to rescue the vegetation. That’s when your quest hits a snag. The visions you get are _visual_ , no scents attached. Whoever designed your powers wasn’t concerned about ADA compliance. In the parking lot, you quest around, nose in the air, looking for an olfactory match. “He didn’t put out his cigarette all the way, and it fell. He was parked near the trees.”

Jade sniffs experimentally as well. “We can’t break into every car nearby, and they all smell sort of burning to me. I don’t know how people stand riding around in those.”

You have to admit you miss grubvans, which smelled more organic than mechanical. Jade isn’t used to cars either, and she spent early days growling when they went by until Dave joked that she’d chase after them trying to sink her teeth into a bumper. You keep searching. Rich blackberry, eggshell, spoon in your mouth… The flavors line the tarry parking lot like an entomologist’s case of polished beetle shells. “Blue,” you say. “The car was blue.”

“Got it.” She hurries over to her target and tugs the handle. “I’ll get inside. Keep watch or… something.”

“Or something.” You stand dutifully to one side and catch a whiff of lime when she uses Space abilities to jimmy open the door. “This is criminal activity, Miss Harley. Right in front of the nose of the law.”

“I’ll put it back,” she grunts, already half-bent over the front seat. The fake leather squeals as she straightens up. “What does the nose of the law think of this?”

The cigarette she’s retrieved is foul with the promise of bigger blazes to come. “Compelling evidence. Get rid of it.”

She crushes it under her shoe, and you hear the locking mechanism click shut. You also hear a raised voice carry across the parking lot.

“Hey! Are you two messing with my car?”

The accusation is laced with the mustiness of weakly invoked authority. Nothing to be afraid of. “Sorry.” You turn so the approaching man can see your opaque lenses and pointed grin. “Thought it was mine.”

That throws him, and Jade drags you into the park before you can antagonize him further. Trees reach overhead. In your mind’s eye, smoke had curled through their branches. Now, the leaves rustle quietly.

Some of the tension leaves her shoulders as you walk deeper into the woods. “You grew up in a forest, right? We should come down here more, it’s nice.”

 _We_ again. “My forest was bigger.” These trunks are tiny in comparison, bland as boiled pasta right out of the pot. You’ve been told autumn will liven up the foliage, but the bark never gets any better, and there’s only so long you can enjoy variations on green. “Nothing as good as home.”

“Would you have let it burn?”

You shrug – not your problem – and feel the chilly silence of her disapproval. “Too immoral for you? Don’t worry if you don’t like me. It’s a common sentiment.”

For the first time, you get a strong reaction. “No!  I don’t…” She struggles for a moment to find the words. “You’re sharp with people. Sometimes because you want to be left alone, sometimes because it’s a test. I know you care about things more than you let on. Some things,” she amends, when you open your mouth to say no, you really don’t give a shit about the trees. “And the bad attitude isn’t all genuine, but after the last few years, I’ve decided intentional bad attitudes aren’t my problem anymore.”

The words sting a little. Not because of any judgments on your character – you’ve heard worse – but as a reminder. The world moves in two directions, Terezi. You’re not the only one paying attention and dissecting people. Sometimes other people do it too. “You sure you don’t just think I’m a cranky jackass?”

She snorts. “Maybe a little, but I’d say we’ve all earned it. I’ve sure had some grouchy moments of my own, if you’ll remember.” She scuffs her foot on the path, and gravel skitters off into the underbrush. “I’ve sunk a lot of effort into trying to make people happy. It turns out things don’t work that way – it usually makes us both worse off. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want everyone to feel better.”

“But we’re harder to charge off and rescue, huh?”

She sighs, and you can imagine the downward twist of her mouth. “Sometimes you have to stay small.”

Regret hangs in the air, the sour shock of biting into an unripe fruit too soon. You don’t know if she regrets trying or failing. Probably the latter, if you’re any judge. Her types usually do. “It looks nice, caring about little things. It takes a lot of energy for me to feel that way about much these days. I think specialists would say that’s the clinical depression.”

She reaches out and presses her palm against a disc-shaped scar on a tree’s trunk. Her hand fits with the fingers curled a little. “I didn’t always. Last year I let a few of my plants die. I didn’t mean to, but it was just so much effort, and I lost track. When you’re sad, sometimes time gets… stretchy. Days take forever, but weeks go like _that_.” She pulls her hand away and snaps her fingers.

You’d lost track of everything in the last stretch of your journey. Time, relationships, yourself. You keep running out of places to stand, until eventually you’re just falling. You’re only slowly finding your footing again. “So this forest rescue is your redemption?”

She laughs. “Guess so. My tragic superhero back story.”

“The plant protector, saving the greenery she couldn’t before.”

You can smell her smile as a crescent of white in her dark face. “Making up for my gardening neglect. My supervillains are blight and unsustainable factory agriculture.”

“Mine would be… people making bad decisions, I guess.”

“Your roster of enemies will never be empty.”

“I throw a lot of punches at the mirror.” It’s a joke, but you’ve done it. When you saw your reflection for the first time after Aranea healed your eyes, you’d stood there for a while. The Terezi in the mirror came from before you messed everything up, before you pretended justice was as blind as you were and paid the price. Looking like her again didn’t take you back in time. You couldn’t understand why you’d ever thought it would. Punching the glass wasn’t a conscious choice. Time just… stuttered, like the way Aradia might blur and skip in combat, and then the mirror was a mess of cracks while your knuckles stung. You wiped the welling blood off your knuckles and pulled your hood up.

When Karkat complained about “everything on this goddamn meteor going to shit and falling apart, I bet one of those dead assholes trashed our bathroom” you kept your head down. Rose had been suspicious – you’d smelled the rotten sulfur stink of her distrust – but she didn’t say anything. They’d broken the habit of asking you questions. If they hadn’t, maybe things would have gone differently.

Jade has been quiet. Above you, birds trill warning calls at each other.  You wonder if they’re updating each other about the two intruders in their midst. What does Earth fauna think of you? “It sucks climbing out of the hole you’re in,” she says at last. “Even if I never was as deep as you. You probably hate how chirpy I am about it. But sometimes it’s caring about the small, pointless things, like deciding on a color of nail polish or helping a turtle cross the road, that snaps you out of it for little while.”

“Or rescuing a scraggly patch of forest?”

“Or doing that.”

The humans from Prospit always struck you as more straightforward. That didn’t mean they didn’t hide things. If anything they did so better. But their approach to life can be refreshingly simple. Just do things. That easy, huh? Then again, you do feel little better for getting up and making a small, positive change. Saving something that wouldn’t be saved if Terezi Pyrope had died on a chilly, distant meteor, even if only some animals and a few nature fanatics will notice.

“For someone who’s taking a rain check from emotional labor, you could have fooled me,” you say, but there’s no acid in it. You’re curious. You killed her once. Not as directly as John, but she died all the same, and she traveled with a pair who had no reason to love you. Why should she care about your mental state?

To her credit, she gives the question thought. Once, you preferred to answer fast and think faster, without giving your counterpart a chance to get ahead. Conversations were games you wanted to win. “Old habits die hard, I guess. And reaching out to people… it makes me feel more stable too, instead of being all alone. I know we’re not close. Right now, you probably don’t feel like branching out. I know all the people have been overwhelming for me.” She tilts her head down as she says that, and you think of all the times she’s retreated to her room or sat quietly in a corner when everyone was raucous. “But like I said, we’re all here now, so I’m trying. Besides, if you’re going to socialize with my sister-mom, I might as well get to know you.”

You point a finger in her direction. “I knew it. This is a trap. You’ve dragged me out here to threaten me with a shotgun.”

“I gave up guns,” she reminds you. “Besides, I don’t need them.”

“You don’t scare me,” you tell the girl who can wreathe whole planets in fire.

“I’m glad.” And you can sense her relief, like a lightening of pressure when a storm turns its course away. You hadn’t noticed until it was gone. She’d wanted this to go all right. “Maybe we’re not best friends, but the way things are right now, we’re all kind of family. If that’s not too weird to say.”

You don’t say anything. Instead, you breathe deep – turning your face up and taking in the rich woodsy smell you remember from home. It’s better than ashes.

“You know,” Jade says. “There are these huge redwoods out west. Maybe as big as your tree. I always wanted to go see them myself. Maybe we should check them out some time.”

She’s trying, not out of faux politeness or a hidden agenda, but because you’re part of each other’s lives now. You’re no longer in freefall, but you’ve had to build the ground back underneath yourself piece by piece: Kanaya helping you make a few semi-sarcastic home crochet decorations, Jane pointing out the best fruit on a shopping trip, Aradia telling you what you’d missed while she’d been away. Step by step, growing a world back together out of places to stand. And if Jade’s going to offer, why not? “Sure,” you say. “That sounds alright.”

You walk back home the long way, through the trees.

**Author's Note:**

> And that's a wrap, folks! There are a few prompt responses I didn't move over from my blog because they're just pesterlogs or I don't wish to include them in my Tuesjade Cinematic Universe, but my Quest is complete.


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